The question "What do women want?" famously perplexed the world's most preeminent psychoanalyst. I'm not surprised Sigmund Freud couldn't figure out a good answer. After all, he may have been one of the great geniuses of modern times, but he was also a man.

Still, at least Freud wanted to know. Which makes me wonder what a one-night stand might have been like for him. There he'd be with some fleshy paramour, both of them on the couch, both exposed. "Is that what you want?" he'd ask, a look of anxious concern on his face as he probed her. Afterwards, he'd pick up his cigar from where it had been idling in the ash tray, get back into his chair, cross his ankle over his knee, and say, "Zo ... now zat's done, tell me about zis fixation on your father."

But like I said, at least Freud was curious. At least he was concerned. Men these days could care less about what a woman wants, or so the evidence suggests.

Researchers from Stanford and Indiana University recently found that heterosexual undergraduate women have orgasms only half as often as the men they're hooking up with, and only a third of the time during a first sexual session. The study – which will be published later this year in the book Families as They Really Are – also found that men receive oral sex about 80% of the time in first-time hookups, while women get that lucky less than half the time. And so, the researchers hypothesise that the lack of sexual reciprocity could be a key reason for the so-called orgasm gap, as the Daily Beast recently reported.

And they call this news?

To some extent, at first glance, it seems to be the same old story: Men are selfish pigs. And yet that seems like a vast oversimplification. The study does not ask the question "What the hell is wrong with dudes?" as much as "Why don't women demand that they get their fair share of satisfaction?" That's the only way they're going to get it during a one-night stand, after all. As Michael Kimmel, who spoke to 400 men aged 16 to 26 before writing his book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, told The Beast: "Men don't pull their weight ... because no one makes them."

I took an informal poll of a few females I know – none of whom seemed terribly surprised by the findings – and found there were a plethora of explanations. Many a college woman has gone through with coitus on a first hook-up just to bring the whole encounter to an end. She may have started out drunk on a cocktail of Chardonnay and giddiness, and in sobering up a little, began to realise she wasn't enjoying it all that much. On top of it, the guy was likely cajoling her – or pressuring her; letting him in to do some jack-hammering seemed like the easiest way to resolve the situation. In a situation like that, she wouldn't feel too comfortable giving the protuberant young turk a quick lesson about the finer points of clitoral stimulation.

Others may feel like they "owe" it to the guys; that they've gone so far down the path – or up the flagpole – that there's no backing out at that point. Similarly, some do it because they want to be liked. I'm not saying any of these are good reasons – just that they're possibilities. Another possibility: the woman might think that the only chance she has of getting any catharsis from a limited lover is through the actual act of fornication. The whole thing could also be a power trip for her, in which case not getting herself too worked up is preferable so she can stay in control.

Another statistic seems to carry a stronger implication that men are lazy self-absorbed lovers: even in longer-term relationships, women have roughly 60-80% fewer orgasms than men, depending on which study you look at. But here again, I think it would be facile to say that the imbalance is a result of men sucking – or, as it were, men not sucking enough – because the female orgasm is a relatively complicated achievement. The male climax, on the other hand, is a fairly simple matter for the standard college-aged male. Often, a woman doesn't need to do very much more than let a guy in her trap door for the whole thing to, er, come off successfully.

For a female to enjoy the analogous pleasure, however, requires physical self-knowledge on her part; she also needs to be capable of and confident about communicating her desires, as well as having them met. And when you consider that only 60% of the college women in a 2007 Stanford survey said they masturbated to the point of climax (as opposed to 97% of men) — or similarly that Dr Elisabeth Lloyd, author of The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, concluded a third of women never have orgasm during intercourse – it seems clear that many females don't know themselves how to achieve an orgasm. And it seems unfair to expect a man to bring a woman to her peak if she can't do it herself.

So women, my best advice to you is: know what it is you want, sexually – a vibrator works about as well as a divining rod if you need help figuring it out – and then ask for it. There's nothing wrong with desiring sexual satisfaction, or asking for it. And before having sex again with someone just because you feel like you "owe" it to him, ask yourself if you don't owe yourself just as much.